Belonging in the Body: A Pastoral Theology of Lay Eucharistic Visitation and the Care of Persons with DementiaJulia Powers, MDiv(c) and MSW(c) at Duke Divinity School and UNC School of Social WorkStudent Essay Award Winner

Marie is many things. She is a spunky African-American woman, widow, mother, grandmother, proud alumna of UNC Chapel Hill, and retired journalist, having spent much of her adult life covering politics in Washington, DC. These days, she is elderly, has severe dementia, uses a wheelchair, and lives in a memory care facility in North Carolina. She is a life-long Episcopalian and her daughter Kelly is an active member of my Episcopal church. Once a month, I am commissioned by the church as a Lay Eucharistic Visitor to visit Marie and offer her the Holy Eucharist. During some visits, she thinks I am her daughter’s friend and during others she thinks I am a junior reporter in need of career advice. Once, she believed it was the 1960s and offered up a thick description of her involvement in the Civil Rights movement – simultaneously a history lesson for me and a description of what felt like the present for her. We were, in a sense, physically present together in the present...and mentally existing in entirely different decades.​From that day forward, I wondered: If Marie’s mind and mine are seemingly in such different places, what unites us? (Quick answer: the Eucharist.) If she doesn’t know who I am and doesn’t demonstrate visible recognition of what she is receiving in the Eucharist, why am I visiting? What difference does it make, theologically, when I go for a visit? What difference would it make, theologically, when I get caught up in my own work and skip a visit? In the course of this paper, I will not likely be able to adequately address all of these questions; I will, however, seek to flesh out the question of why and for whom pastoral visits, including Lay Eucharistic Visits, to persons with dementia ought to occur. Is such a visit undertaken for the spiritual benefit of the visitor, the visited, Christ’s body in the Eucharist, or Christ’s body the Church? There is ample reason to see spiritual benefit for each of these parties. In this paper, however, I will argue that any spiritual good accrued by the visitor is to be seen as secondary to the primary purpose of attending to the visited for the sake of upholding their belonging in Christ’s body the Church as demonstrated by Christ’s body in the Eucharist.